Glasscraft Club

The club entitles members to the benefits listed below for 12 months
from the
date of purchase. The membership can be purchased from Glasscraft for
$100 per
year, without the option to buy a partial year.

25% Club discount on color from applicable companies.

15% Club discount on Kimble tubing and rod.

20% Club discount on Simax and Chinese clear and colored tubing and rod.

Hamm

Posted on Tue, Aug 28 2018 6:32 pm
by David Winship

For decades Hamm has been showing us things we’ve never
seen. He’s an exceptional glassblower, sharing his extraordinary imagination as
an artist, craftsman, and tool maker - he invented the recycler for God’s sake.
Going back 10 years, anyone would be excused thinking that the 9’ tall rocking
chair he and his team built at the 2009 Las Vegas Invitational was nothing more
than a crazy one-off. He did, after all, unmake it a couple of years later in
an alley behind a CHAMPS show. http://bit.ly/2BGXZ83 (Ironically Hamm forced a
rule change for the CHAMPs Demolition Derby when no one could break his car.) But
in spring of 2017 when the folks from Pilchuck asked him to teach a class, Hamm
brought it full circle and resurrected the furniture concept. Shown here with
an elegant coffee table (including service!) that he, his TAs, and students
made this summer at Pilchuck, we can now officially add “furniture maker” to
his impressive list of accomplishments.

Hamm is the best glass furniture maker on the planet!

In order to pull this off, from the spring of 2017 all the
way through early 2018, Hamm formulated ideas, tested concepts, built gear, and
iterated prototypes.

Things started to gel in early 2018, so he made a couple of
side journeys – to a 4/20 event in Southern Oregon and to the DFO in Portland. During
both of these events he offered us teasers of what was coming.

Without divulging too much, Hamm and Team Awesome (Travis Jones, Phil Davis, Max Caswell) thrilled crowds by creating large, mobile,
functional pieces, using curtains of fire from the Large Format Dragon, a
burner of his own making: 32 jets, 4 feet long.

We do plan to present a webinar with video captured during the
DFO of Team Awesome making a huge rotating merry-go-round dry pipe.

Yes…they are roasting marshmallows in the shot above.

Having put so much into the project and not wanting to leave
anything to chance, Hamm visited Pilchuck prior to his session just to make
sure he’d be accommodated by the facilities. That visit included a conversation
with Pilchuck staff that probably went something like:

Pilchuck: “Soooo…this is our
lampshop where you’ll be working. Looks pretty good eh?”

Hamm: “Well, the ceilings are too
low: my torch will burn this place down.”